Epiphany
by La Flamingo
Summary: For some, these moments of realization come in the blinking of an internal lightbulb. For others, the epiphany takes time. Either way, they will understand. [vignettes]
1. Swallowing Spoons

**Swallowing Spoons**

(Dead Reckoning)

The first time he accidentally swallowed a spoon, it took him ten minutes to figure it out.

The second time took five...and this time he threatened himself: if he swallowed an eating utensil again, it might be a fork.

Wally stopped eating _too _fast after that.

Until today, that is. But after helping out around Central City and then transporting his oh-so-hungry molecules up to the Watchtower, Wally realizes that he really _is _hungry and that he's old enough now to watch his utensils as he eats and make sure they don't go anywhere bad.

So it's definitely disconcerting when (after hearing that he totally blew the turn-everyone-into-apes and vanishing thing) Grodd's voice pops into his brain–_hello, Flash–_and suddenly his fork vanishes from his hand.

Wally freezes instantly and realizes that he's still not old enough to watch his utensils when he eats.

Dammit.


	2. They're Only Human

**They're Only Human**

(Tabula Rasa)

J'onn finds that his talk with the dog was the most comforting, the most real.

Humans themselves had officially disgusted him for the last time, and he told the beast that as they sat together on the rock.

J'onn learned from this that dogs wag their tails not only when they're happy, but when they're thinking.

_They think we're stupid, _the dog told him.

_Doesn't it bother you?_

Tail wag. _Not always. Sometimes. _More furious tail wag. _It all depends, I suppose. _

J'onn shifted uncomfortably. _Your kind–are you slaves?_

The mutt turned its head over to him and smiled, baring teeth in a lopsided grin. _We could be, I suppose. But humans...I don't believe they see the relationship as such. _

_What are you, then?_

The tail slowed down. _Friends. Family. Guardians. _The dog stopped smiling and cocked its head. _They are not all like the monsters you see, Green One. Surely you have realized that now. _

J'onn inwardly frowned. _But they are not all the friends _you _see. You are out here alone, _he observed_. That does not help your argument that they are friends. _

The dog–as only dogs can, and to a greater extent the act being more subliminal than not–shrugged. _My master was not the kindest of men--but, _A wider smile flit on the dog's face, and the tail beat the earth furiously, _not all humans are like that, and I do not hold my master's stupidity against him. He is–after all–only human. _

J'onn stopped. The dog's grin elevated into a beam and his body shuddered as he rose up from sitting and walked over to where J'onn was leaning against a boulder.

_They're only human, Green One. Some good, some bad...we cannot all be like your kind. _

Staring hard at the dog, J'onn considered petting its head. Something stopped him, though, telling him that this beast was too smart to be treated like an animal.

_But I am, _the dog said, smiling as he listened in. _And I like having my ears scratched. _


	3. Papercut

**Papercut**

(Only a Dream)

The papercut isn't deep, but the fact he cut himself on _paper _irks him more than anything else can As he reaches for the tissue box near the right of his desk and rips one out, dabbing at the small slash of blood oozing through, though, something stops him.

Lois sits, watching him from her desk with a raised eyebrow.

"Papercut, Smallville?" her voice rings over the hustle and bustle of the newsroom and for a moment hurts him. There's something sharp about it.

"I don't get why you're so surprised," she continues, rising up from her chair and walking over until she is at the edge of his desk. "I mean–it's not like you're..._invincible _or something."

Invincible.

The word rips through him just as it was intended and suddenly Clark sees something in her eyes that wasn't there before.

Knowledge and hatred.

_She knows_, a part of him whispers.


	4. Destiny

**Destiny**

(The Once and Future Thing Part II: Time, Warped)

Alternate dimensions irritate him.

Parallel universes? Yeah, those are a pain in the ass, too.

But none of those match up to time traveling.

He hates that the most.

Bruce can cope with the past as long as it doesn't involve anything in his own life time. One-hundred, two-hundred, three-hundred years back is all fine with him. He doesn't like it, but he'll deal with it and get back to his own time soon enough.

The future though? The future's a messy thing, and he thinks _this is a bad idea_ as Chronos tentatively tells him that he's pressing the wrong button. When the world goes black a second later, he _knows _it was a bad idea.

...and the awakening in the future less than five seconds–in his time, at least–later isn't much better.

A part of him knows that it's Gotham just from instinct. The darkness and gloom and smell of exhaust and trash and people is all too familiar, all too close to home to be a different town.

The guys dressed as Jokers back up the knowledge, too.

He tries to block out the young kid dressed as him when they're fighting, tries to ignore the different costume, the different weapons and most certainly the different style of fighting–_he talks too much_, a part of him growls–but as they flee, the reality that he's staring at someone who has taken up _his _name continues to haunt him.

The rest of the trip is akin to walking a tightrope between a nightmare and a daydream. Sometimes he's imagined what the future might turn out for them all–for John, Wally, Clark, J'onn, Shayera and Diana–but he hasn't dwelled on it too much in fear of losing focus. Now with the future (_we don't know that) _staring him right in the faceit's kinda hard not to notice.

Older Bruce hasn't changed much from what he is now. He's still ornery, fierce, stubborn as hell and though he's lost a few inches via slouching, the only difference between the two is that one is more capable of fighting–physically–than the other.

That isn't what terrifies him, though. As he continues to try to keep himself tied down, keep with the past and remember _this is not set in stone_, people start changing around him and then John flips images and Diana slowly fades away and then he realizes that he doesn't want this.

He doesn't want to see a seventeen-year-old boy fighting like he's a full grown man, doesn't want to see John staring at his son with something resembling fear and awe in his eyes and he doesn't want to see _his _Gotham so brutally torn apart by a spineless creep who got a little clicky-happy with his Time-Belt.

The world disintegrates around the Green Lantern and the Bat as they bounce down time towards the light at the end of the tunnel, but when Bruce grabs Chronos and sends him on the way to an eternal hell, he tells himself forcefully that _destiny is a bunch of bullshit. _Life won't end this way unless he lets it.

...and then–very suddenly--everything's normal. No embarrassing blurbs on his behalf–no food on his tray, either–and both John and him are seated awkwardly in the cafeteria, looking around as they try to gather their wits.

Bruce doesn't fear getting old, becoming (more) cranky and eventually dying.

...but he does fear the future.

Yeah. Time-traveling sucks.


	5. Resilient Specimens

**Resilient Specimens**

(Starcrossed)

Flying over the mountains is the biggest release for her.

They had them on Thanagar–big brown monsters that loomed like the teeth of a demon–but they didn't match the beauty and majesty of the ones they have on this Earth. The mountains here are not brown, but a wide variety of colors, varying where she flies and what season she comes around in.

America has largely become her playground, so she tries to familiarize herself with the mountain ranges there before doing anything else.

Appalachians–far east, running along from Alabama up into Southern Canada. She likes them because during the spring they flourish with bright greens and shades of blues, and during the fall the entire area explodes into oranges and reds, like fire.

Sierras–Nevada-California border. Down by that gambling city–Las Vegas–these mountains remind her of the home world the most. She never had seen cactus before (and she doesn't want to fall on one, either), but she marvels at the resiliency of the area. At one point she lands on one of the craggy, dusty peaks sixty-miles outside the Sin City and just sits, watching.

A lizard crawls out from underneath a rock, back scaly and eyes cold and hard. It evaluates where the sun is (just setting), and where everything else is (doesn't seem to notice her) before quickly shifting its way towards another rock. Shayera watches it in amusement and awe as its legs push themselves over the sand and dirt and scrub towards another hiding spot, but when she sees a small shadow suddenly appear overhead, her amusement turns to something resembling dread.

The hawk dives down, snatches the reptile and within seconds what she thought was a resilient specimen of Earth is gone.

Uncomfortably, she is reminded of her ex-companions.


	6. Dead Eyes

**Dead Eyes**

(The Savage Time)

At the crack of the rifle, John knew he had to be back in hell.

He had been lucky, he reflects now, that the ring saved his ass for a good part of the night, because otherwise he might have been dead meat.

That's not to say that John is spineless, or cowers when he hears the sound of a rifle, but he knows that the vulnerability that presents itself without his ring can be almost as debilitating as fear itself.

He was tired, cold, somewhat shell-shocked and now thrown back into a time when he didn't know the ring.

John's fast on his feet. He's a quick thinker, and he knows how to fire a gun.

...nevertheless, it frightened him to be back in the foxholes, to see other dirt and blood-streaked faces peering up from the edges of ditches and to hear the sickening _snap _of an eight-millimeter bullet bite its way into someone's flesh.

When one resides in the realm of gods and goddesses for so long, it can be terrifying to come back down to the world where fear and hatred are the only things that keep you going. No more 'justice' and grace. The world had descended back to its Darwinian roots, and John can't say he really likes it this way. War had changed from when John last saw it in 1991. He could say truthfully that war in the Gulf had been nothing with war in Europe.

Ultimately, though, it wasn't the retreat to Darwinism that scared John.

It was the bodies.

He had been running, fleeing desperately from those sadistic spiked-wheel tank-things when the crack of a rifle sent him diving into the skeleton of an old house.

For a moment he did nothing, only keeping his back pinned to the concrete of the wall and keeping himself perfectly still. There was no breathing, no muscle movement and no thought.

If he didn't move, maybe they would never know that he existed.

Five seconds passed. Then ten, twenty, thirty and forty. John waited for the boom of an explosive to wipe him out, to erase him from the past, present and future, but it never came.

Instead he heard quiet sniffling.

It took him a minute longer to adjust to the darkness and to the eerie stillness of the structure, but when he did, John knew it might've been better if he hadn't adjusted at all.

She was small, no older than ten years old, but the look in her eyes was something reminiscent of the soon-to-be-discovered Holocaust survivors. Sitting in the corner furthest from John, she watched him warily and with something resembling a quiet hatred. John didn't understand the rage entirely until he looked at what she was cradling in her lap.

He was probably four, maybe five. Blood soaked the front of his shirt in a black stain that oozed to the floor, the copper stench wafting over to him in a noxious cloud.

He was clearly dead.

The girl didn't speak, nor did she make a move to come towards John or acknowledge his presence as a possible friend. There was only rage in her eyes backlit by deep, unrelenting pain, and as she sat there, sniffing quietly with unblinking eyes, John realized that she was wounded as well. Blood at her arm gave notice to a possible shrapnel or bullet wound.

But she said nothing, and only stared.

The two evaluated each other for a long, painful moment before the girl finally spoke.

"Sortez-vous," she whispered, voice low. John stopped, cocking his head and trying to understand what she wanted before she hissed again.

"Partez-vous maintenant!" The girl shifted only slightly to make her dead brother more comfortable on her lap, but her message was clear.

Get out. Beat it. Leave me in peace.

John ran, then, slipping out through the door to the small slice of hell and fleeing through the dark, fire-lit streets of a village that was nevermore.

There was a reason he fought, now. Earlier the great battles and the guarding had all been because of justice and good, but now John realized that there was something more to the story. Something much more.

He was fighting to stop war. To stop this madness and violence and the empty eyes that stared at him in that dark corner of the room, watching him and waiting for Death to make the final move. It wasn't fair, wasn't right and wasn't deserved.

No child deserved to see that.

No one.

...John never told anyone what had happened to him in that small French village. As he joined Easy Company, eventually snuck into one of Savage's bunkers and helped save the day, he didn't tell anyone about the small girl and her brother.

But he wonders.

And those eyes still haunt him at night.


	7. Go Fish and the Other Family

**Go Fish and the Other Family**

(Paradise Lost)

On the walk back to the Javelin, she reminds herself that an Amazon must keep pride even in defeat and loss. Even as her heart is breaking, she tells herself that she must keep her posture strong if she wants to remain the Amazon she wa–_is. _The shoulders must remain back, the spine kept straight and the chin held high. It is pivotal to keep the outer shell strong or else the mind will collapse even more heavily upon itself

Diana tries to reassure herself by saying that this is not a funeral. She is not dead. Her sisters and mother–not dead, either. No one has died except the damnable Faust, and for him the death was righteously deserved.

This is not a funeral.

This is not execution.

It is simply exile.

But exile is no simple thing. For those who hated their motherland in the first place, maybe, but Diana has nothing but love for her homeland. She feels no ill-will towards it, no hatred towards her sister and the woman who banished her in the first place. She loves her home.

And now she must leave it.

When they are in the air, the cabin of the aircraft is silent. Flash opens his mouth once or twice to speak, but at the stone-cracking glare from the Bat he snaps his jaw shut. J'onn remains up front most of the time with Superman, speaking privately about what Diana can only assume is probably Themyscira.

It is painfully quiet. Halfway into the atmosphere, the Flash finally snaps and says something.

"This might not be a real help–" Batman glares from his seat nearby– "but when we get back, do you want to play Go Fish?"

Diana has heard of this game before. Superman calls it a fun game for kids, J'onn shrugs and says that cards didn't exist on his home plant and Hawkgirl frowns, mystified. The other two–Green Lantern and Batman–haven't been around during the discussion, but Diana isn't sure they'd answer positively, anyway.

However, her interest has been mildly piqued. Now drawn away from her earlier sadness, Wonder Woman is now curious.

"Go Fish?"

Flash knows when an audience is hooked–pun intended--and abruptly becomes very animated. "Oh, yeah...it's a great game to get your mind off bad stuff."

The Bat snorts. Flash ignores him and continues, "There's no thinking involved. Just get a deck of cards, seven people and a round table and you're set."

"Is there any gambling?"

Flash's smile grows. "Of sorts. It all depends on who's up for spending money."

Diana watches him for a moment, thinking. "If you can get all of us to play, I'd be glad to try this game of 'Go Fish.'"

Flash beams, and within an eye blink he's suddenly seated in the chair in front of her, holding out a deck of cards and looking around for a hard surface to play on.

Batman simply stares.

Back at the Watchtower, the game begins. Flash deals out the cards in a blur of red on red, and more than once flips a card face-up as it flies to a hand. Superman vocalizes irritation–"Flash, deal slower or don't deal at all"–while Hawkgirl picks up five of her cards and frowns in confusion.

The Green Lantern simply keeps his cards flat on the table and raises an eyebrow.

"Poker is better,"he rumbles quietly. "More money involved."

Flash looks up from dealing. "What, are you broke or something?"

The Lantern smiles slowly and shakes his head. "Oh, no...I just happen to _win _more with cash."

"It is unfortunate, then," J'onn says from his seat, voice mildly amused, " that some of us don't have money."

Batman's jaw twitches, but otherwise he remains silent.

Hawkgirl leans over towards Green Lantern.

"So, wait--I do what with this card...?"

Over the long and painful course of an hour, as Superman guides her through her hand and the Bat finally speaks pointedly towards the Man of Steel–"I hope you're not looking at my cards–"the realization finally comes that Diana is not alone.

Though her sisters on the island would frown at the suggestion, Diana understands now why Flash brought up this card game. Maybe he knew what he was doing, maybe he didn't, but the man has somehow made Diana realize that the people in front of her–from the confused and bewildered Hawkgirl to the glowering Batman–_are _her family.

The Green Lantern would say that she's being corny. Flash would say something stupid. Superman would smile. Hawkgirl would scoff at the mere suggestion of relation and J'onn would glance at Diana and give a nearly imperceptible nod that he _understands _exactly what she means.

The Bat would frown.

...but he always does, so it doesn't matter.

It is the family away from family, she realizes. So widely different in their personalities, their powers, their beliefs and their lives and yet they all connect when it comes to being there for good. They don't entirely agree, and it's very rare to have a moment where there's not a tiny dispute somewhere, but the fact exists that they're still _here. _Helping. Always there.

No, Diana reflects. They're not her sisters on Themyscira.

But as family, they're something Diana would never give up for the world.


End file.
